


All the World's a Stage

by Gwerinos (orphan_account), KathKnight



Category: The Mandela Effect - Fandom
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-14 06:12:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15382431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Gwerinos, https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathKnight/pseuds/KathKnight
Summary: All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances.





	1. All the men and women merely players

**Author's Note:**

> This is a multi author work, where each author writes one chapter. Chapters have no set length, some will be short and others long. Characters will come and go.

Conrad looked out of the 2nd storey window at the man standing on the footpath staring up at that same window. This was the third night in a row that he had been there. He turned away and grabbed his coat.

 

“Where are you going? Dinner is almost ready,” his wife called after him as he hurried through the front door. 

 

By the time Conrad reached the top of the steps, the stranger had turned away and was walking across the street, heedless of the traffic. One car seemed to drive straight at him as if the driver had not even seen him.  Conrad watched as the car 'hit’ him and he pixelated and faded into nothingness. 

 

That night Conrad lay awake most of the night, getting just enough sleep that he didn't fall asleep at work the next day. 

 

His work was interesting though not very challenging. He was hugely over qualified for writing software for new computer games which other people came up with and took all the credit for, even though it was his skills that made their visions a reality. He was not considered one of the creators, but simply one of the mass of programmers who worked for a wage. 

 

“You're getting too old for this work.”

 

Conrad looked up from his screen. “What's that?”

 

“You are not getting overtime. Go home.”

 

Conrad grabbed his coat and noticed the frayed cuff. It had been his favourite for close on ten years. It wasn't that he couldn't afford a new coat but that this one was comfortable and quite sufficient for working with a bunch of young adults with over inflated opinions of their own abilities. A couple of them were school dropouts who thought their computer skills didn't need improvement. 

 

But Conrad had been working at this job for a very long time and knew how fast the tech was growing. He had a degree in physics, had taken several engineering classes and kept up with the latest in IT. 

 

He raised two daughters, neither of which took after him. And now he and his wife were quite content to live a simple unassuming life. He had regular work. She had her days at the local charity store. They had their grandkids two weeks every year, and took the same two weeks holiday every year. 

 

At 57 years old, he was far from retirement, but just lately something in his life seemed off. He wasn't sure what ‘off’ meant, but that was definitely the right word for it and retrospectively, something had seemed off all his life. It wasn't a midlife crisis. He been through that when their youngest had left home and he'd bought that motorcycle. 

 

More and more strange incidents had been happening and either there was something fundamental that he was missing or he was going insane. 

 

The stranger was waiting for him on the steps this time. Of course, he could simply be a new tenant in the building, but Conrad had never seen him enter. This time the stranger handed him a newspaper clipping. As Conrad looked at it the man walked away and vanished.  

 

That was when then obsession started. That newspaper clipping was framed and hung on the wall over the desk in the corner of the dining room; a dining room that soon became the HQ of the obsession. It hung there in the centre of everything as hundreds of other clippings and articles printed out from the computer surrounded it. It hung there while his wife divorced him. It hung there as his children stopping talking to him. It hung there as the bank repossessed the house. Then it hung on the wall of the cheap rooming house as he drank himself to death. 

 


	2. This is the Silliest Stuffe that Ere I Heard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> KathKnight is the sole author of this chapter.  
> This is what happens when a febrile bag of mucus takes expired pseudoephedrine then decides creative writing is a good idea.

The reality in which Lennon finds himself these days is stranger than fiction as he scrubs his face, gulps down a third morning coffee and pulls on his work uniform.

 

Last year, he was a cogwheel in a large, well-oiled machine; a computer simulation modeler in the integrated planning department of a multi-national mining corporation. The hierarchy of employment meant that while he rarely, if ever, received praise for his successes – at times saving the company millions or billions in lost revenue – his failures were buried beneath layers and layers of management. It was a thankless job; those who asked questions were rewarded and promoted, those who answered them – like himself – were either challenged or ignored, stagnant in their roles. But employment in the mining industry, as always, was fugacious – a downturn in the economy necessitates trimming excess fat, and three months ago, that meant him. His job has since been outsourced to multiple independent consultants at the cost of ten times his salary.

 

Lennon’s real passion, however, was entertainment. Few of his work colleagues knew that he moonlighted as one-half of Cirque Fantastique by night, specializing in juggling, object manipulation and duo acrobatics with his partner and one-time lover. They trained together at every spare moment. He never felt so alive as when he swallowed fire before an enthralled audience or felt Emma’s fingers clenched tightly in his own, palm to palm as the perfect lines of her lithe body extended gracefully into the air in a based handstand.

 

It was at a street festival show that he had first set eyes upon the stranger. A wide-eyed, emaciated, balding fellow dressed in a shabby suit who pushed through the gathered crowd right to the front, obscuring the view of the smaller children in his audience. No one, however, seemed to mind – or even notice.

 

Life has become a strange facade, he muses bitterly, the acrid taste of instant coffee lingering on his tongue as he slides his long legs into the lower half of the ridiculous candy-pink faux-fur suit. It’s this, or unemployment benefits again, he admonishes himself, slipping socked feet into gregarious, three-toed furry slippers. Better to parade about anonymously in a ludicrous costume day-in, day-out, than be queued up at the public welfare office among drunkards and deadbeats, arguing why the ten fruitless job interviews he suffered through last week were legitimate.

 

He zips the back of his suit and retrieves the cartoonish monstrosity of a headpiece from the cupboard, scowling at its glassy, lifeless black eyes staring back at him. Yes, he’s going to do this again.

 

The second time the suited stranger approached him was on the train to the office. He singled him out among the other passengers, staring shamelessly. Something about him was familiar; Lennon couldn’t quite place it but nodded respectfully nonetheless. The old man wordlessly proffered a pamphlet – Lennon refused, bloody evangelists pushing their cause on public transport – but had it pressed into his palm anyway. As Lennon began to protest, the outsider silently turned and shuffled away through the crowded car.

 

It wasn’t a biblical passage or an unwelcome advertisement to save his soul, however. It was a newspaper article from The Herald, December sixth five years ago, commemorating the life of Nelson Mandela, the former President of South Africa. His first thought – didn’t Mandela die in the 80s? When he was a kid? He stuffed the clipping absently into his trouser pocket, forgetting about it.

 

Lennon yanks the grotesque, padded headpiece over his face, securing the tie underneath his chin and straightening the wire in its enormous, gaudy pink-and-white ears, bent from storage where he ingloriously tossed it into the cupboard with his dirty sneakers last night. Is there no end to this humiliation? He retrieves his silken crimson cape from the coat hook by the door, fanning it out around his back.

 

He’d picked the article out days later, examining it curiously, completely befuddled by why anyone would bother distributing it five years after the fact. A cult, perchance? The train route had one distant stop within several blocks of a psychiatric hospital. An inpatient on day leave, maybe? That would explain the grossly oversized, moth-eaten appearance of his attire. It wouldn’t have been the first time Lennon had encountered a raving lunatic aboard the train.

 

A talent scout from ENC, the Cirque Academy feeding into worldwide troupes such as Cirque Eloize and Cirque du Soleil, had spotted Emma during one of their cabaret shows and offered her an audition right then and there. Lennon, unfortunately, was _not quite what they were looking for._ Emma was faced with a choice between an elusive dream career and a stable, secure life with a computer modeler.

 

He hasn’t heard from her in months.

 

A brief Google search at the office between meetings yielded much more than he could ever have anticipated. He was not the only one, it turned out, who erroneously recalled reports of the President’s untimely death thirty years ago. Nor was this an isolated incident inciting such debate. There were those who attested to the coexistence of multiple realities, parallel universes, challenging the very linear nature of time. Mandela passed away thirty years ago _and_ on December fifth, 2013. Like a glitch in a computer game, or a coding error in one of his models. Lennon found himself compelled to delve further; the more he discovered, the more inquisitive he became.

 

He knots the cape tie about his throat, pockets a twenty for train fare and lunch and leaves his apartment, bracing himself for the public ridicule he endures every day. For a paltry twenty-five dollars an hour.

 

Six days a week, he is Super-Bun.

 

The old man awaited him as he left the office, the day his obsessive research began. Lennon was aghast to glimpse that same hunched, suited figure through the glass doors – surely not a stalker? Was his mind playing tricks on him? Undeterred, however, he staunchly ploughed ahead, bypassing the stranger and ignoring his unnerving stare. Reaching the end of the footpath, he hazarded a glance back over his shoulder. _Paranoia_ , he scoffed, watching the man make his way to the busy city street and step directly out into heavy peak-hour traffic. The oncoming vehicles did not slow.

 

His heart skipped a beat as the stranger’s image suddenly pixelated and vanished.

 

Now, aboard the train, he feels his fellow passengers’ eyes boring into him. It’s the cursed costume, the horrid pink superhero-bunny suit that draws their unwanted attention. Or is it? How many of them are just like the old man? Foreigners from an alternate dimension, a way things could have been, crossed over by a bug in the software?

 

Three months ago, Lennon had everything he could ever have desired – stable employment that paid the bills, comfortable accommodation, a loving partner who shared his passion for entertainment. Mundane aspirations, some would argue, but he was content. Look what fate has reduced him to. He glimpses his garish reflection in the train carriage’s glass window, turns his face away in shame. A mascot for a franchised pet-accessory outlet on minimum wage.

 

This isn’t a life. This is a holding pattern.

 

Perhaps one day, he will blur and dissolve into the air himself. If there is a higher power, Lennon is its cruel joke.

 

So he stays aboard as stations scroll past, passengers alighting to begin their daily drudgery and new passengers boarding, pretending not to ogle the ridiculous, caped, giant pink rabbit. Today he might just bypass work and ride to the end of the line, lie on a beach somewhere or reacquaint himself with the circus school.

 

Or the psychiatric hospital.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you are interested in becoming one of the writers in this story, leave a comment to that effect.


End file.
